I'll definitely give them another call. I feel like I'll have a better experience with Optus than with TPG. I've heard alot of good things about Optus from friends and people who have had the same TPG plan as me all have the same comments about it. All of us on the TPG plan never get higher than 500kb/s download. So I'm gonna give Optus a shot

On Optus you will be using the same bit of copper wire, and probably the same modem.

The way you tell if it COULD be better, is to speedtest at 1am, like now. If it's still the same, then Optus will be the same. My father's Optus connection suffers SEVERE congestion at 5pm thru 11pm. I can detect this, even through his slow ADSL

PS: somehow my post, asking you whether you were talking in bits or bytes went missing.

I might look around at other ISPs and see if they can offer me a cable plan instead. Would cable be reliable around apartment buildings? Rather than going for ADSL2+ while being around 3km away from the exchange?

Give it a shot. But you might find they are relauctant to supply cable, due to expecting it (HFC) to be consumed by the NBN. On the other hand, NBN is testing DOCSIS (cable modulation) to be rolled out on NBN.

There's only two ISPs that offer cable (Optus is one of them). If you have cable as an option then I'd definitely recommend it while waiting for the NBN. Have you checked what type of NBN you will get at the NBNCo website.

You can also type your address into these two ISPs websites and it should say if they can provide cxable to your home.